Could weird MEMES be the ultimate education revolution?

We all have had to learn the classic literature during our childhood for an assignment or to pass an important exam. Personally I have had to learn the inner meaning of various poems which often made me wonder “ Is this real? I don’t think these great poets had any idea about the philosophical meanings their words imparted.” I couldn't comprehend that simple poems had such a deep meaning but it all changed when I joined Instagram.

Times have changed and now I understand how the literary experts are able to crack the proses and verses of classic poets. I guess slowly each and every one of us are becoming such experts in not so different field. MEMES. It’s common among us to send memes to our friends which cracked us up and sometimes we get such a lame reply and we realize that our mem quotient is on an entirely different level that our friends can’t keep up. We have to explain these memes to them just like our teachers explained to us those literary secrets in Shakespeare's work.

To help you understand better I will explain 5 different memes that most of my friends couldn't understand easily :

1.

The joke here is that the meme starts off with the “quiet kid” tapping you on your shoulder to tell you something. The “quiet kid” is the person at school who generally doesn’t talk much and seems a little different than most of the other people at your school. But what they tell you is to “ask to go to the bathroom… don’t come back” which sounds super confusing at first but you then realize that the quiet kid is associated with school shootings so the kid is telling you to go the bathroom and hide while he does that awful thing. The reason why he tells you to go into the bathroom though is that you must’ve been nice to him and he doesn’t want to hurt you so he wants you to take cover.

2.

The joke here is that the official Batman account asks “is there anything Batman’s center button can’t do?” Because it’s really helpful. The official Superman account though replies with “save his parents” because the button couldn’t do that because Batman’s parents have died. The Batman account then replies to that with Batman crying because of course, you’d be sad when someone reminds you that your parents are dead. The bottom image then shows DC shooting DC which is there because DC is the company that owns both Batman and Superman, so DC Is making both characters be mean to one another despite them both being from the same company.

3.

The joke here is that sometimes when you’re hanging out with your friends, they notice that you seem a little “different” so being the good friends they are, they ask if you’re doing alright. Most of the time though our answer to this question of why we seem different is that “we’re just tired.” Although this is the answer we give most of the time, it’s normally not honest because a lot of the time when we seem “different” it’s because we’re just sad about something we don’t want to talk about and we don’t have the energy to act how you normally do. This relates to the image shown because it’s a very small bandaid attempting to cover a massive wound, just like how is saying that we’re just tired is just a little bit of the truth compared to the entire reason why we’re acting “different.”

4.

The joke here is that the YouTube video at the top is titled “15 minutes of useless information” which honestly sounds like something interesting to watch. The bottom half of the meme though is making fun of the educational system through the title of the YouTube video along with a DVD titled “how I stretched a 15-minute story into 11 years” which is making fun of the TV show known as “how I met your mother.” This fits the educational system perfectly though because there isn’t much vital information you learn in school at all and most of it is just random information you’ll never use in your life. So showing the cover of the DVD case and saying it’s basically school is a bit of an exaggeration considering we need more than 15 minutes of information, but it’s not that far off and we really don’t need that much time to learn everything vital but for some reason, we’re forced to learn a bunch of other stuff causing us to have to go to school for so much longer. This is how schools manage to turn some quick things you need to know in life into years and years of stress and exhaustion even though most of it isn’t necessary for the slightest!

5.

The joke here is that the one guy texts his boss about how he is unable to work that day because he has a fever, and to show this, he also sends a picture of a thermometer that shows “103.4° Fahrenheit” which is a pretty high fever (about 39.6° Celsius). If you look at the top of the image though it clearly says “here’s a pic of my thermometer from the last time I was sick in case anyone needs an excuse to get out of work” which tells us that the guy really didn’t have a fever at all and was just attempting to skip work that day. But because he forgot to crop the top part of that image out, his boss was able to see it and could then figure out that the guy was just lying and wasn’t really sick at all which is why he tells his boss he’ll “see you in 10 [minutes]” because he knows he has to go into work sadly.

Now, I am sure most of you understood the memes without even me explaining but you could not avoid the fact that you know at least one person who would find it difficult to crack those.

So what if we extended this to the school curriculum. Memes could be used to either increase or as a fun way to teach complicated concepts. During this pandemic, there has been a huge shift for education sector and lot of startups have been sprouting with creative methods to teach students.

The potential of memes is limitless. Students could be used to create memes about a particular topic as their assignment which would surely make them think harder giving a real boost to both their knowledge as well as their creativity.

Teachers could create memes about a mathematical equation or a science theory and students could have fun while studying boring subjects. The sky is the limit.

I hope this article would inspire at least one teacher to try this concept and who knows 20 years from now textbooks would be filled with memes and we may stop complaining about the educational system.